A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a software that consolidates customer data from multiple sources to provide a unified view of each customer. It helps companies understand their customers better which leads to improved customer experience.

While both the software collect data, a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) essentially uses customer data to manage customer-facing interactions and relationships. On the contrary, a CDP emphasizes on unifying customer data across all offline and online channels, capturing every customer attribute, behavioral, transactional data, and more to build a single source of truth to generate actionable customer insights.

A DMP (Data Management Platform) is a software that collects and manages data of website visitors and digital advertising campaigns, while a CDP collects and stores customer data to create a unified view of each customer across multiple channels and touchpoints to curate delightful customer experiences.

A CDP can collect a wide variety of data types, including:

Demographic data: age, gender, income, education, etc.

Behavioral data: website visits, purchase history, email opens, clicks, etc.

Customer service data: support tickets, chat logs, etc.

Social media data: likes, shares, comments, etc.

Third-party data: data from external sources, such as BigQuery.

A CDP comprises robust security and privacy measures to keep customer data safe and secure. This includes data encryption, access controls, and regular security audits. A CDP also complies with relevant data privacy regulations like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Yes, a CDP can seamlessly integrate with other marketing technologies, such as marketing automation tools, email marketing, and digital advertising platforms. You can integrate any marketing tool with CDP to create targeted and personalized marketing campaigns across multiple channels.

Implementing a CDP can take anywhere from a few weeks to several months, depending upon various factors, such as the size of the company, the complexity of the data sources, and the level of customization required.

Any business that collates customer data from multiple sources can benefit from a CDP. This includes industries like e-commerce businesses, financial services companies, and healthcare organizations, to name a few.

The best practices for using a CDP begin by outlining your business goal and how a CDP can help you achieve them. You can combine a CDP with any marketing tool to unify and turn data into actionable insights, optimize communications, increase customer loyalty, boost sales conversion rate, drive customer retention, and more. CDP provisions a clear data governance plan to ensure your customers’ personal data is managed accurately and securely across platforms.

WebEngage CDP helps you stitch data points from multiple sources to create a 360-degree view of your customers. Apart from delivering actionable customer insights, it lets you build rich customer profiles, build dynamic and static segments, enables seamless third-party data integrations, protects customer data and comply with global privacy rules. It also eliminates the threat of broken or duplicated data promoting better marketing decisions.